OTTAWA — To the bitter end, Mike Duffy was asking not just for the moon, but the sun, the stars, the whole shooting match.

Now, the 69-year-old is on trial for a sheaf of fraud and breach-of-trust offences and bribery, but then, it was the spring of 2013.

He should have felt like the luckiest little son of Prince Edward Island, ever.

He should have been on his knees with gratitude.

Justin Tang/CP

Already, he had been assured his questionable expenses would be re-paid and that he would be “made whole,” in the loathsome jargon of the political world.

That means it was agreed that whatever he’d done he’d done innocently, or at least he could make a reasonable argument that he had, and so, music to his ears, Duffy would not have to repay a single sou from his own apparently hermetically sealed pocket.

The powers that be in the Prime Minister’s Office were also working bewilderingly hard, unsuccessfully it turned out, to have Duffy “withdrawn” from the Senate’s Deloitte residency audit.

His legal fees – he had lawyer Janice Payne negotiating on his behalf — would also be covered.

But on March 25 that year, Payne was again writing her contact in the PMO – Ben Perrin, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s special adviser and legal counsel — on Duffy’s behalf.

Duffy, she told Perrin in an email, wanted “better clarity” with their understanding-in-progress, even as Nigel Wright’s $90,000 bank draft was about to materialize and get Duffy out of a sizable pickle.

The former veteran broadcaster wanted a guarantee that if any other senator sought his removal from the Red Chamber, or if anyone sought to refer his controversial claims for investigation “by Deloitte, the RCMP, or any other party,” the Conservative leader in the Senate would rally the caucus and speak and vote against it and support him.

Perrin forwarded the note to Wright, the prime minister’s then-chief of staff, now the star witness at Duffy’s criminal trial

“How can we do that?” Wright asked.

He’s a deeply circumspect man, in person and in writing, but even so it was clear he was gobsmacked by the temerity of the request.

“If someone thinks a crime has occurred,” Wright said, “can we have an internal agreement not to refer it to the RCMP? I think that would be a scandal, no?”

A little later, he told Perrin, “It just seems politically indefensible to have an ‘agreement’ not to refer any matter to the RCMP.”

‘I just felt, I don’t want to be sensational, but I felt this was an outrage on the taxpayer and had to be made whole’

These exchanges probably best capture who Wright is, an indisputably skilled political operative, a Harvard-educated lawyer who uses words like “effectuate” and “parens” (short for parentheses), but gets down and dirty, and yet a man who remains capable of drawing lines even in the shifting sand.

Wright, who was Harper’s chief of staff for almost three years until in May 2013 he quit/was fired precisely because he used $90,000 of his own money to pay off Duffy’s expenses, completed his examination-in-chief Wednesday by prosecutor Jason Neubauer.

His cross-examination by Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, begins Thursday and given Bayne’s gaseous tendencies, may go on for days.

Wright was exceptionally fair in his testimony: He admitted that he was “pressuring Sen. Duffy pretty heavily to repay expenses (Duffy) believed were proper” and said though he personally deemed the expenses inappropriate, “I thought he had an arguable case.”

This was in February 2013, when Wright and others believed that Duffy owed only about $32,000 and that they were all Ottawa-area living expenses.

It was on that basis Wright approached Sen. Irving Gerstein, chairman of the Conservative Fund, to see if the party would be willing to help, and it was.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

It was then Wright also went down the hall to see Harper, told him about the proposed “media lines” the government would feed to the press and public (Duffy may have made innocent errors but was otherwise a splendid fellow, blah, blah, blah) and got his OK, then warned him that this might set a precedent for other troubled Conservatives, MPs and senators, who might then expect the government to help them, and got the green light for that too.

That, Wright said, was what his infamous “we’re good to go” line meant.

Alas and alack, he learned soon after that Duffy, in fact, owed about $90,000, that he’d been charging per diems as well or, as Wright correctly put it, “he’d charged for time spent in his Kanata home” where he’d lived for years.

“It made me angry,” Wright said.

“Listen, I just felt, I don’t want to be sensational, but I felt this was an outrage on the taxpayer and had to be made whole.”

The party, Gerstein told him, now wasn’t willing to pay (“I think, in this matter, his judgment was better than mine,” Wright told Ontario Court Judge Charles Vaillancourt with a wince) and Wright, unable to “think of another way to do it,” determined “I could do it myself and I would do it myself.”

It was, he said, “a relatively quick decision for me. I lived to regret it.”